


Holy water cannot help you now

by heavenisalibrary



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, nonspecific time period Doctor as priest AU, sometime that's old, somewhere in New England
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 03:47:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1536392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn’t see him again until he’s twenty-three, a priest now, and he returns to their town. She’s a bit older, never married, and when they come across one another in the town square, she marches right up to him and slaps him across the face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holy water cannot help you now

**Author's Note:**

> Continuation of [this ficlet](http://queenriver.tumblr.com/post/79284071825/how-bout-mattex-historical-au-but-maybe-i-need-that) written off a tumblr prompt. For Emma, 'cause she asked when I first did it.

They meet when they’re children. Him: small for his age, big-eared, dopey smile, all uncoordinated limbs and surprising, disarming charm. Her: endless curls, sharp eyes, toothy smiles, all quick wit and anger. That they fit together is surprising, but he’s quick enough to challenge and refocus her — her normal tactics for pushing people away and scaring them out of befriending her don’t work with him. He sees the challenge in the set of her jaw and rises to it. In school, her teachers look at her like some sort of rabid animal, liable to bite at any minute. But when he sits next to her, willing and able to distract her whenever he sees her begin to drum her fingers against the rickety desk, she becomes manageable. Not different, not tamed, but calmer.

He comes to her house some days to help her with her chores — her family has acres of land they can barely manage to farm, although her parents are warm and wonderful and make it seem like less of a chore than most. His family has money for generations, and they hate the callouses he develops spending his afternoons with River and the Ponds, but he ignores their disdain. He’d known from the moment he first heard whispers of Miss River Song, the young lady adopted by the too-young couple at a too-old age who refused to pin back her hair, that they’d be friends; he may have had a foothold in society, but he felt every bit the outcast that she was. 

Some nights, she climbs out her window and he climbs out his and they lay in the middle of the fields and look up at the stars, naming the shapes and patterns with nonsense words to make the sky their own.

____

His family sends him away when he’s a teenager. He’s too spirited, too mouthy, not nearly devout enough to please them. He spends too much time with that Song girl and too much time on his own and no matter how often they board up his windows they know he climbs out again, even if they can’t rightly figure out how. He promises to write to River and the handful of other acquaintances he has, but the uncle he goes to live with doesn’t let him.

His parents pass away, and River lingers around the outskirts of the funeral, even though she’s not invited, but he isn’t there. She’s thirteen when she tucks away the star he once embroidered with her name as a riff on her own dismal skills in a box and tries to forget about her best friend altogether.

She doesn’t see him again until he’s twenty-three, a priest now, and he returns to their town. She’s a bit older, never married, and when they come across one another in the town square, she marches right up to him and slaps him across the face.

It takes him weeks to get her to actually speak to him.

____

He doesn’t approach her like she thought her would — like one of those rabid animals other people always regarded her as — instead taking her on as though no time as passed at all. Whenever he runs into her — which she’s sure he does intentionally — he talks her ear off as she resolutely ignores him. After mass, he corners her and forces her to at least make polite small talk, lest she risk the retribution of the other townspeople for being rude to the instantly beloved Father Smith. It takes nearly two months for him to make her smile, and it’s totally inadvertent. He’s in the middle of a sermon, just working up some energy when he trips over his own two feet and goes sprawling into the front pew, face-planting into the bosom of one of the more distinguished, elderly women in the town, and when he stands up, babbling apologies and blushing to the roots of his hair, he meets her eyes and he sees her smirk. He can’t help but smile back, and her smirk blooms into a smile, and when he giggles at that, she rolls her eyes and huffs, and he knows he’s got her back.

____

He shows up at her house the next evening — she lives on the edges of the Ponds’ property, land she tells him she bought from them, land she works herself — with some delicious bread someone gave him.

“They’d never want you to share this with me,” River says.

“All the more reason to do so,” says Father Smith.

She grins, taking the bread from him and letting him inside. He can barely conceal his glee at having worn her down, and in his delight he walks a bit too close behind her, and when she turns to face him she jumps slightly to see him right at her back. He rocks forward and back on his feet.

“You’re a bit of a rubbish priest,” she says casually.

He beams at her. “Oh, River Song. I’ve missed you.”

She rolls her eyes and huffs. “Come here, you big idiot,” she says, pulling him into a hug that he doesn’t expect, but after a moment of flailing he relaxed into her, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tight to him. He exhales heavily as she buries her face against his throat and clings to him like a lifeline.

When he can’t stand to let her go nearly five minutes later, he knows he’s in trouble.

___

They pick up right where they left off. He spends evenings at her house, more often than not, and she lingers around after mass so they can talk. Some nights they lay out under the stars and recall all the silly names they gave to them, and piece by piece they reclaim their friendship. River’s at once the same and different than he remembers her. She’s still fiery with a temper that’s become infamous and a filthy mouth that makes the churchgoing members of their down blush, but she’s calmer, somehow. Her anger isn’t directionless — she doesn’t suffer fools, not even briefly, but she doesn’t lash out at her own shadow anymore, either.

Perhaps the biggest change, he comes to realize, is in how he feels toward her. River has always gotten him better than anybody else — he knows that she thinks it’s the other way around, but she knows just how to wind him up and draw him out and when he’s with her, he feels like a person. A normal, decent person. His mind doesn’t race a mile a minute, he doesn’t have to double back over what he’s already said, he doesn’t have to try and prevent himself from hurting her feelings with his own occasional insensitivity. Around River, he can just _be_.

That’s all the same. What’s different, he decides, what’s _really_ different, is that the dirty-kneed little girl with mud on her face and grass stains on her elbows and hair the size of a small planet, made out of youthful angles has completely disappeared. River isn’t a little girl anymore — quite the contrary. She’s a woman, all lush curves and soft, golden skin and hair she’s learned to tame into beautiful ringlets he wants to run his fingers through every moment he’s with her. She still tends to skimp on the personal primping, but the childish affection he’d always felt toward her is quickly swallowed up by the sort of longing that he’s never experienced. 

The sort of longing he’d taken vows to ignore.

So he ignores it. He spends as much time with her as he can, and if he touches her a bit more than he ought to when they’re alone, well, no one’s around to see it. Her parents have him over for dinner occasionally and he feels like part of their family, but balancing that with seeing to the spiritual needs of the town is not easy. The Ponds and River are not particularly well-liked, even now — too outspoken, not nearly godly enough by the good people’s opinion, although he thinks they’re perhaps the kindest people he’s ever met. He has to meet up with River later and later, and instead of speaking to him after mass, she gives him an apologetic glance and slips out. He knows she’s trying to spare her reputation, because every evening she’s waiting for him.

___

He manages to keep everything between them under control for two whole months. It’s made significantly easier by the way she starts to distance herself from him, physically. She used to sit beside him when they’re at her table; now she sits across. When they lay outside and look up at the stars, her shoulder would brush up against his, and now even if he reaches out his hand he can’t touch her. At first he thinks it’s propriety — River trying to politely let him know that he’s become too familiar with her. When he brings it up, awkwardly, she throws her head back and laughs.

“You thought I was — what? Correcting your _manners_?”

“Well, you — and I — I’ve been a bit _forward_ , and you —”

“ _John_ ,” she says, “in all the years you’ve known me, exactly how much weight have I put on behavorial codes?”

“Er… none.”

“Right,” she says, “and still you thought I was slapping your wrist for, what, touching my arm too many times per night? Get off, honey, really.”

He blusters, babbling about something or other and tugging on his white collar as she scoots her chair around to his side of the table, leaning toward him to completely invade his personal space. He doesn’t expect it, and he jolts backward slightly, almost overturning his chair, but she places a firm hand on his knee to stop him bowling over. When he’s put to rights, her face is less than half a foot from his, and she’s still laughing at him.

“Is this better, sweetie?”

He huffs, but can’t help but note that she hasn’t moved her hand and _really_ this was the opposite of what he needs right now.

“Not really,” he says. He shifts his weight, but he doesn’t calculate the movement, because it just moves her hand further up his thigh, and with the way she’s leaning into him, her face flushed, her pupils wide in the dim lighting, lips curled in that sinful smirk — and he’s an idiot, and a _priest_ , and he can’t help but react. He swallows, and starts to try to stand and run away before she notices, but when he meets her gaze he knows that she already has.

“ _Oh_ ,” she says. “Is that what this is about? Do you fancy me, John?”

He tugs at his collar again, but he can’t bring himself to move away from her. “Of course not.”

“Well _somebody_ does,” River says, raising her brows and looking pointedly at his crotch.

“ _River_ ,” he says. “I do not — I don’t fancy _anybody_. I’m a priest. A proper man of God. The only person I might fancy is Him.”

She laughs again, and he feels like it must be two hundred degrees inside of her house. She lifts her hand from his thigh so she’s only resting her index fingers against his dark trousers, and then she slowly traces it up and over his… _problem_ so quickly that he doesn’t have time to move away as she says, “this is for God, then?”

He splutters, and she pulls her hand back to herself, all but cackling as she stands and moves away from him, and his whole body deflates with relief. He closes his eyes, covering his blushing face with one hand as he tries to remember the words to a prayer — any prayer — in order to distract himself, but he can’t remember a thing except the way River’s fleeting touch had felt.

“You want to know a secret, Father Smith?” River says hours later, when she’s seeing him out. The way she says his title sounds incredibly dirty, and warmth trip-hops up his spine at the sound of it.

“What’s that?”

“I _was_ putting space between us on purpose,” she says, “but not to correct your manners. Seems I fancy a holy man myself.”

She shuts the door in his face with an adorable little wave before he can even respond.

___

He doesn’t go to her house the next evening, nor the night after that. When she comes to mass, though, he can tell she didn’t expect to see him, and he wants to continue to ignore her but it seems he can’t take his eyes off of her the whole time he’s speaking. She’s toward the back, looking as though she’s hanging on his every word even though he knows she barely believes in God at all, biting her lower lip. He’s supposed to be thinking about the divine but all he can picture is the way her face looked that night, so close to his, and he realizes the two are pretty much the same anyway.

She lingers in the back of the church as he exchanges pleasantries with what seems like hundreds of people, and he makes his way over to her while the last few families chat on their way out.

“How’ve you been?” he asks, very aware that he’s far too close to her.

“What, in the two days you’ve been avoiding me?”

“River…”

“Don’t _River_ me, Father Smith,” she says.

He swallows as the last person leaves the church, and it’s just them. Maybe he moves toward her, or maybe she moves toward him, he doesn’t really know what happens — but somehow he ends up falling back on the pew with River on his lap kissing her enthusiastically. He thrusts his hands onto her hair, tugging his fingers through it as she shifts her dress up so that she can straddle him, her lips shifting from his as he gasps. She presses kisses along his jawline and down his throat, his hands sliding from her hair down her back to grip her ass and pull her against him. This time when she reaches a hand down to press against his erection, it’s not fleeting, and she covers his mouth to swallow his moan. It might be five minutes later or it might be forty but at some point he realizes where they are and what’s happening and positively _yelps_ , shoving her off of his lap and hurrying to right his clothes, trying not to think of the symbolism as he picks his collar up off of the floor.

“This can’t happen,” he says, pacing away from her. 

“Can’t time travel, honey,” she says, “it already did.”

“No,” he says, shaking a finger at her as she walks toward him. He backs away from her down the center aisle, trying to ignore how predatory she looks as she follows after him. “ _No_ , God will forgive me my tresspasses and yours as well — we just can’t do it again — can’t — stop…. River, you stop right there. Don’t you come any closer!”

“Are you scared of me, Father Smith?” she says.

Oh, _God_ he loves how she says that.

“No, no! I’m…” he trails off as he bumps into the alter, turning around to catch the wine before it falls from the altar, and when he turns around she’s standing in front of him. She reaches up to press a kiss to his forehead, her body resting against his, and he doesn’t _mean_ to, but somehow his hands end up resting on her hips. “River, _please_.”

“Tell me what you want,” she says.

He pauses, trying to stop himself from doing exactly that. “I…” he intends to say that he wants her to go home, that he wants to go back before he knew that she fancied him, before he’d inadvertently admitted he fancies her, but what comes out is, “I love you.”

It’s not nearly what he’d meant to say, and the words burn his throat as he thinks of the implications, but she merely smiles, kissing his lips chastely. 

“I know,” she says, and when she kisses him again, it’s not chaste at all.

He shatters his vows moments later, making love to her on top of the altar, and in all his years of seminary and bible studies and sermons, he’s never felt closer to the divine than he does when River Song comes with his name on her tongue.

___

Their dinners evolve to consist of less talk and less clothes, and the clear nights when they name the stars, he spends more time gazing at their reflection in River’s eyes. He’s never been happier, even though he knows he has to hide it. He feels like a fraud and a cheat, even when River tries to soothe him, but the truth is his heart was never in his religion — it was just a way to do some good, he’d hoped, and a fast ticket out of his uncle’s stuffy house. If he’s really, scary honest with himself, he knows that part of him knew he could come back to River this way — all of the stars they gave names as children and all of the heavens and divinities he’d studied to become a priest, and he thinks that the only universe that’s ever really had any gravitational pull to him is the one within River.

They make love in the woods of respectable folks late at night, in the confession booth while people pray outside, on the rug in front of River’s fireplace, under the open sky; he presses kisses to every inch of her skin and makes her body his Bible, her words his psalms, the beat of her heart synced with his as his only hymnal. He loves her with every ounce of his being, and sometimes when she thinks he’s already sleeping, she tells him that she loves him, too, as she curls into his side.

___

It’s all very wrong, but very right, and they keep their secret for a whole month before he slips up and shows up at her house in the middle of the afternoon. River’s sounds of pleasure are overheard by a group of gossiping matrons out for a stroll, and their gossip reaches more influential ears, and suddenly it’s a scandal. River’s never been married, and there are few single men in their town who could indulge in any sort of tryst without scandal — either she’s sinning with someone’s too-young child, someone’s husband, or someone’s fiance. No one mentions Father Smith, and he tells River that she can out him when she’s brought before a makeshift court.

Of course, no one can tell River Song anything. She gives an incredible performance when she claims to have been possessed, and tells them that her cries of pleasure were not pleasure but fear and pain — John shouldn’t like her theatrics. But he kind of does, a bit.

It saves her being totally excommunicated or worse, and it saves his reputation. But it does mean she needs to be exorcised, and so he volunteers. He drapes himself in somberness and black and irony, the collar feeling a bit too tight, and tells everyone else he’ll be fine on his own. They lock River in a room and tie her to the bed, and he lingers in the hallway with a few others.

"The devil is strong in this one," says his neighbor, a short man who wears self-righteousness like a cape, and often lectures his children on the values of religion, even though he himself spends more time at the tavern two towns over than at mass. "You won’t be safe alone, Father Smith."

"I can handle her," he says. "The Lord is on my side." He thinks about how he hasn’t believed a word of his own sermons for months, and wonders whether perhaps River really is possessed — perhaps there is a God, and here is his punishment for his faithlessness.

He hears them all murmuring prayers as he passes them all by, making the sign of the cross as he goes, and enters into the room they’ve kept her in.

"This is your fault," she says mildly, the moment she sees him. "I was fine, keeping to myself before you came and turned everything inside out."

He snorts. “And I was a man of God before...”

"You were never a man of god," she says with a smirk. "You were a little boy playing dress up.”

“You know you could’ve avoided this,” he says, deadlocking the door and approaching her where she lays, draped in white sheets, he nostrils flaring and her eyes wide. Sometimes she lets him tie her up, but only when she orders it and can tell the type of knot he’s tying by the whisper of his fingers against her wrists — he can see every muscle in her body straining not to panic, and knows his girl tends to bite when backed into corners. “You could’ve told them it was me at your house all of those nights.”

"And be condemned for blaspheming with a priest? No, thank you, father."

“I would’ve been the one condemned,” he says.

"Yes, and that would’ve been much more bearable, I’m sure," she says. "I was trying to help." Tension releases in her frame with her exhalation as he arrives at her side, running a hand from her temple to her chin and down her neck and along her clavicle. “Feigning possession seemed to be the easiest way out.”

"It’s not," says Father Smith. "We’re going to have to put on quite a show. And then we’re going to have to stay very far apart until this whole thing is forgotten about."

"Ah," she says, "but I will see you at mass."

"For two months," he agrees. "Then I’m leaving."

She looks alarmed.

"Oh — oh, no, no, River. You’re coming with me.”

"Am I?" she asks, suddenly cheeky. She raises a brow at him, and he leans down to kiss it.

"Yes," he says, "if I’m going to hell, I’m taking you with me."

"Oh, good," she says. "It’s dreadfully cold in New England. Now, forgive me, Father, for I have sinned — many times in many positions. Exorcise my demons and set me free."

He doesn’t read her the bible, but he does read the lines of her body, chants against the smooth rhyme of her skin, kisses her everywhere like small benedictions. Her captors yell into the room at one point — do you know, now? Do you feel the devil working his evil within you? — and River’s toes curl as she screams back that yes, she can feel the devil working in her, and Father Smith bites her for the awful word play, digs his teeth into the skin of her shoulder because he knows that she knows how those words will cut into him, how they’ll both enrage and excite him. He punishes her with his teeth against her soft skin, pressing harder into her until he can hear her labored cries edged with the sort of pain that thrills her and sees her wrists growing red as she strains against her bonds. If he’s her demon, she’s his, and just as with him, he’ll never exorcise her; even if he wanted to go back to a life of God, he’d never be able to live without her.


End file.
